Description
A logic error in the expr utility of uutils coreutils causes the program to evaluate parenthesized subexpressions during the parsing phase rather than at the execution phase. This implementation flaw prevents the utility from performing proper short-circuiting for logical OR (|) and AND (&) operations. As a result, arithmetic errors (such as division by zero) occurring within "dead" branches, branches that should be ignored due to short-circuiting, are raised as fatal errors. This divergence from GNU expr behavior can cause guarded expressions within shell scripts to fail with hard errors instead of returning expected boolean results, leading to premature script termination and breaking GNU-compatible shell control flow.
Problem types
CWE-768: Incorrect Short Circuit Evaluation
Product status
Any version before 0.8.0
Credits
Zellic
References
github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/11395
github.com/uutils/coreutils/releases/tag/0.8.0